There’s a new open source cloud in town. Meet Apache CloudStack | Hacker News Reader

There’s a new open source cloud in town. Meet Apache CloudStack

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49 pointsiProject13 comments

Traditionally Apache projects have been seen by the bigger companies like IBM, HP as common ground and (with exceptions) well managed. It will be interesting to see if some of those companies building solutions on top of OpenStack shift their interest/resources to CloudStack. It is certainly more production-ready than the alternatives.

I have no experience with the OpenStack but I would be extremely surprised if anyone with any experience with the CloudStack switches over.

Last time I checked it out, the CloudStack had a homemade ORM, no messaging queue, windows line endings on nearly every source code file (primary deployment platform is linux, I don't find that encouraging) and worst of all, the test coverage was in low single digits. It felt like a project being run by a marketing team, built using contractors and absolutely riddled with bugs. That said, if you're planning to run a private cloud with it and don't mind it falling over once in a while, then it's simple to setup and get running.

Your account was created 4h ago, so I really do not know if this response is for real or just trolling. The CloudStack offering was one of the few that got traction in the marketplace and had several high profile production deployments, including major telcos, Zynga and GoDaddy. You can discuss many other aspects, but in terms of maturity it has always been ahead of the rest of private cloud implementations (and that was one of the reasons for the Citrix acquisition)

I didn't want to associate my main account to the comment because it was candid, negative and I don't work with the CloudStack anymore.

I last looked at it in December and they might've worked every issue out by now. That said, you're welcome to investigate every single claim I made, as of then at least, each concern I listed was still present. Marketplace traction or acquisitions are not going to change the fact that what you're dealing with is 200K lines of code with 5-7% test coverage.

"Mature" and "high quality code" are largely unrelated attributes. Given that CloudStack was developed as proprietary code this criticism seems unsurprising.

First Eucalyptus moves for AWS API offical blessing from Amazon and now cloudstack becomes an Apache Project. Looks like the private Cloud space is just heating up with lots of moves by companies to become the de-facto Open source alternative to AWS.

Lots of parallels to the Desktop space (MS Vs Linux flavors)

Chasing the AWS model is a bad idea. It's all well and good to provide AWS API compatibility, but do that as a layer of abstraction on top of a better system with more flexibility underneath.

Shooting for AWS as your gold standard, to me, seems to be aiming too low. AWS is a far from perfect system.

CloudStack has it's own well-documented API.

Today, CloudStack uses a separate translation layer, and has for some time, to translate AWS API to CloudStack API. That will remain the same going forward, except the translation layer will become a bit more integrated.

Isn't that the OpenStack philosophy? "Lets be flexible"

I like AWS. You're right ... it isn't perfect. But it is good enough. And that's exactly what you want for a standard IMHO.

Just my personal opinions.

It doesn't matter. AWS still wins!

As @Adrianco puts -

Tenses and predictions: Eucalyptus have; CloudStack will soon; OpenStack will eventually reluctantly; license the AWS API #gameover

"License"? I wasn't aware Amazon was claiming any sort of control over use of the AWS API. Certainly any such assertion would raise serious legal questions like some of those now at issue in Oracle's lawsuit against Google.

It seems to be the way of the world. The Google Cloud Storage API is an exact copy of the S3 API. If you can't beat them, join them.

If folks are wanting to check this out, my work build some VMware appliances for it. You should be able to get the server running in just a few minutes. Anyway, in case it's useful:

http://www.rpath.com/solutions/cloudstack.php

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